Hercules

Hercules demonstrates that there is no genre Brett Ratner cannot reduce to mediocrity.

He's the guy who made the Rush Hour trilogy and The Last Stand, an X-Men movie so disappointing that this year's Days Of Future Past takes special pleasure in erasing it from the franchise's continuity.

This time around, the director unleashes his gift on the sword-and-sandals picture, spinning the late Steve Moore's comics - set in a "real" world without gods or monsters, in which Hercules was simply a powerful warrior who let his legend precede him into battle - into a grey and mundane action movie.

Axes are swung, arrows are launched and helmets are smashed, and Ian McShane and Rufus Sewell get all the good lines because Dwayne Johnson's Hercules isn't allowed to crack a single joke.